Adding Hours in Excel

Adding hours in Excel is something that you might want to do if you were keeping track of employee records. Find out about adding hours in Excel with help from a mechanical engineer with 32 years of experience in a large aerospace company in this free video clip.

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Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Ted. Today, I'm going to show you how to add hours in Excel. This can be very useful for instance if you're doing payroll calculations. So I have a spreadsheet here, which has an imaginary list of people and their times, and I want to add them up. Now let me show you the pitfall you can get into. Any time you add a column of numbers, you just go down to the bottom, click on the cell, and use the sum formula, or if you're lucky enough to find the sum symbol somewhere up in your menus, you just click on this, and Excel knows as long as you have a continuous set of numbers that that's the numbers that you want to add. And we hit a return, and clearly all these numbers added up don't equal nine hours and 26 minutes. So we'll delete that. Instead what we'll do is, first of all, the numbers have to be in the correct format. So let's just go to format. I mean I've already done this, but I'll just show you where you find it. Go to format, cells, time, and you want the time that looks like this, it's hour, hour, colon, minute, minute, here it's, you know, 13.30, or 13 hours and 30 minutes is the same. Basically, if the times are in that format, then you can go over here to another column and you can use the hour function. So we're gonna type equals hour, open parenthesis, click on the cell here, close parenthesis, hit return, and sure enough, the basically, the time in hours rounded down is ten. We'll center that so it looks nicer and then we'll go here and double-click on the bottom-right of that cell, and it copies the formula down. And then if you want the minutes, you can do the same thing with the minutes formula, minutes, open parenthesis, click there, close parenthesis, copy the, center it, copy the formula down. So there we go. So now you have the hours and the minutes, and now if you go and do a sum, you will get the correct number of hours. Do the same thing here, get the correct number of minutes, and if you wanted the total number, you could do some calculations just with standard Excel formats knowing that they're 60 minutes in an hour and do whatever you want with it. So I hope this has been helpful. I'm Ted, and today I showed you how to add hours in Excel. Thanks for watching.